COMMUNITY ENERGY RESOURCE GUIDE

The Community Energy Resource Guide, published by the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) in December 2015, provides a comprehensive roadmap for U.S. communities to develop energy action plans. It outlines a collaborative planning process, methods for analyzing energy landscapes, and specific tactics across the buildings, electricity, transportation, and industry sectors to accelerate the adoption of renewable energy and energy efficiency.

• A successful community energy planning process prioritizes transparency and collaboration over the final product, as a shared vision is more likely to lead to adoption and impact. The process typically takes six to twelve months and involves identifying leaders, baselining current energy use, prioritizing strategies, and seeking formal commitments.
• Effective leadership for energy initiatives requires a representative team of catalysts and a 'backbone' support organization. This backbone provides dedicated staff and a modest budget to ensure the initiative remains independent of local politics and city budget cycles.
• Community energy workshops serve as catalysts for launching the planning process. These sessions should involve 20 to 50 diverse participants and use a 'diverge-emerge-converge' approach to brainstorm, explore, and prioritize energy goals and tactics.
• Analyzing the energy landscape should begin with high-level estimates and benchmarking against similar communities to determine the 'size of the prize' before committing to in-depth technical analysis. Key data points include energy consumption by sector, utility fuel mix, and greenhouse gas inventories.
• Broad enablers that cut across multiple sectors include Green Banks, which leverage public funds to attract private investment, and financing mechanisms like Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE), on-bill financing (OBF), and on-bill repayment (OBR).
• Building efficiency opportunities include adopting best-in-class codes, implementing energy-disclosure ordinances, and pursuing 'deep retrofits.' Deep retrofits are most cost-effective when integrated with planned major equipment replacements, providing value beyond energy savings, such as improved employee productivity.
• Communities can increase renewable electricity supply through various utility and non-utility levers. These include Green Tariffs, Community Choice Aggregation (CCA), and 'municipalization,' where a city purchases distribution assets from an investor-owned utility to operate its own municipal utility.
• Transportation energy use can be reduced by focusing on two primary levers: reducing vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in single-occupancy vehicles and increasing fuel efficiency through alternative fuel vehicles (AFVs). Strategies include regionally coordinated mass transit, open transit data for mobile apps, and smart-growth policies to encourage transit-oriented development.
• In the industrial sector, communities can drive efficiency through 'integrative design,' where whole-system thinking creates compounding savings. Examples include industrial ecology (where one company's waste is another's resource) and Combined Heat and Power (CHP) systems, which recover heat that would otherwise be lost during power generation.

APA

Bunker, K., Doig, S., Fowler, E., Mandel, J., & Michelet, C. O. (2015). COMMUNITY ENERGY RESOURCE GUIDE. RMI. https://rmi.org/app/uploads/2017/04/Community_Energy_Resource_Guide_Report_2015.pdf

Chicago

Bunker, Kaitlyn, Stephen Doig, Erik Fowler, James Mandel, and Christa Owens Michelet. COMMUNITY ENERGY RESOURCE GUIDE. RMI, 2015. https://rmi.org/app/uploads/2017/04/Community_Energy_Resource_Guide_Report_2015.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=Bunker |first1=Kaitlyn |last2=Doig |first2=Stephen |last3=Fowler |first3=Erik |last4=Mandel |first4=James |last5=Michelet |first5=Christa Owens |title=COMMUNITY ENERGY RESOURCE GUIDE |publisher=RMI |date=December 2015 |url=https://rmi.org/app/uploads/2017/04/Community_Energy_Resource_Guide_Report_2015.pdf |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{bunker2015community, author = {Bunker, Kaitlyn and Doig, Stephen and Fowler, Erik and Mandel, James and Michelet, Christa Owens}, title = {{COMMUNITY ENERGY RESOURCE GUIDE}}, institution = {RMI}, year = {2015}, month = dec, url = {https://rmi.org/app/uploads/2017/04/Community_Energy_Resource_Guide_Report_2015.pdf}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }